This blog is a critical appraisal of a randomized control trial which investigates the effects prehabilitation has on quality of life and functional abilities in patients undergoing total knee or hip replacement.

This is the thirty-second blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.

Are you very different from the people studied? Systematic reviews of studies that only include animals or a selected minority of people may not provide results that are relevant to most people. This may be misleading.

This is the thirty-first blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.

A systematic review of fair comparisons of treatments should measure outcomes that are important. A fair comparison may not include all outcomes that are relevant to treatments. Patients, professionals and researchers may have different views about which outcomes are important.

This is the thirtieth blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.

Systematic reviews sometimes conclude that there is “no evidence of a difference” when there is uncertainty about the difference between two treatments. This is often misinterpreted as meaning that there is “no difference” between the treatments compared.

Much research has looked into the use of exercise for patients receiving cancer treatment, however few studies have focused on palliative care. This blog is a critical appraisal of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) which evaluated the use of a physiotherapy programme to reduce cancer related fatigue in palliative cancer patients.

This is the twenty-ninth blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.

“Statistical significance” is often confused with “importance”. The cut-off for considering a result as statistically significant is arbitrary, and statistically non-significant results can be either informative or inconclusive.

This is a Portuguese translation of the fourth in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 Key Concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims. With thanks to Guilherme de Mattos Queiroz and Cochrane Brazil for the translation.

This blog explains that treatments that have not been properly evaluated but are widely used or have been used for a long time are often assumed to work. Sometimes, however, they may be unsafe or of doubtful benefit.

This is the twenty-eighth blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.

The confidence interval is the range within which the ‘true difference’ is likely to lie, after taking into account the play of chance. Whenever possible, consider confidence intervals when assessing estimates of treatment effects. Do not be misled by p-values.

This is the twenty-seventh blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.

When there are only few outcome events, differences in outcome frequencies between the treatment comparison groups may easily have occurred by chance and may mistakenly be attributed to differences between the treatments.

Popular Articles

Critical appraisal tools (CATs) are commonly used by students and researchers alike, as a way of judging a study’s quality. In this blog, Dennis Neuen addresses the need to appraise these tools and has also collated a list of 12 CATs from all over the world.

This is the twenty-ninth blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.

“Statistical significance” is often confused with “importance”. The cut-off for considering a result as statistically significant is arbitrary, and statistically non-significant results can be either informative or inconclusive.